


Waiting For You (To Become Something To Come Back To)

by PastelClark



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canon Compliant, F/M, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, POV Pidge | Katie Holt, Rainforest: A Plance Zine, Spans Seasons 1-4, this can honestly be read as either romantic or platonic I wrote it pretty ambiguously, written for the Plance Zine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-19 23:04:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14882916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelClark/pseuds/PastelClark
Summary: Pidge doesn’t consider communication about her feelings her strong suit, and Lance isn’t good at talking about his own problems to the people that matter, especially when he can solve someone else’s instead—but together, they might just have to learn to try.(Or, five times Lance and Pidge try to voice the hard things that need to be said, with varying levels of success, and one time they don’t need to.)





	Waiting For You (To Become Something To Come Back To)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey. Hi. Hello! 
> 
> This was actually written several months ago for the [Rainforest Plance Zine](http://plance-zine.tumblr.com/), and was a super interesting experiment for me in brevity as I was the idiot who picked a 5+1 things theme and had to somehow keep my six scenes under 2,500 words total (yeah I know you're looking at the word count judgingly I totally failed lol).
> 
> We finally got permission to post our full pieces for the zine, so I'm super pleased to share this with y'all! It was a fun one.
> 
>  

**** 1.

Somewhere in the aftermath of Sendak’s attack on the castle—long after Lance has been seen out of his cryopod, and she has coughed up her secret from her chest—Pidge lies in bed, thinking. The unfamiliar hum of the castle grates on her ears, and she realizes, properly  _ realizes,  _ that she nearly died.

 

Realizes that if she closes her eyes, she doesn’t fully trust that the castle won’t light up the purple of betrayal again in her absence. It sits heavy on her, and eventually, it drives her from her room altogether.

 

She finds herself drawn to the flight deck, where the glow of the new crystal lights up the scorch marks and scars marking their earlier battle. She sits there, staring at it for what feels like an eternity, trying not to think of Shiro’s scream of pain over the monitor, Haxus’s cries as he fell into the abyss of the castle’s inner depths. Just  _ trying _ , at least until there’s the shuffle of noise behind her, and a startled yelp from a familiar voice as he hurriedly scooches back around the doorway.

 

Pidge rolls her eyes. “I don’t own the flight deck, Lance.”

 

“…Right,” she hears him say, and slowly he inches into view, sitting down next to her gingerly, as if expecting her to explode at any moment. There’s a flash of momentary annoyance at his caution, but as she watches his fiddling thumbs in his lap, something inside her softens. She isn’t the only one who nearly died today.

 

“Can’t sleep?” she tries. It’s not quite an  _ are you okay? _ because she doesn’t know even remotely how to approach this, but God help her if she doesn’t at least  _ try _ . Lance deserves that much, right now.

 

He shrugs. “Tried, but—just couldn’t settle down, I guess.”

 

She nods, keeping her eyes trained on the crystal rather than him. “…It was scary,” she admits quietly, reluctantly. “Finding you here. I thought you’d…”

 

“Sorry,” Lance whispers, and she doesn’t quite know why—he saved Coran’s life, that’s not anything to be sorry for—but he plows on. “I wasn’t—I don’t remember much, afterwards. I was pretty out of it. But when I heard your voice over the monitor, cursing out Sendak like that, I knew we’d be okay.” He looks over at her, grin brilliant, and something in her throat hurts, wants to demand how he can be so damn trusting. Instead, the words coming unbidden, she chokes out—

 

“I killed him. Haxus.” He probably already knows, but she still has to say it—has to  _ confess _ .

 

Lance’s smile drops. “…It wasn’t your fault.”

 

She snorts. “Do you really believe that?”

 

He shrugs, mouth a thin, grim line. “I have to. I doubt they were the only people on that ship. They—war has casualties, and it was us or them. You didn’t have a choice. None of us did.”

 

Something about his words scare her, and she shakes her head, desperately changes the topic. “Did you  _ really _ not know I was a girl?” Lance’s answering squawk of outrage comes as a relief, safe territory.

 

She doesn’t want to have to dwell on the finality of the word  _ war _ any more than she has to.

 

 

2.

Really, Pidge can’t even find it in her to be surprised that Lance is the one who bursts into her room following their return to the castle, after the collapsed wormhole fiasco.

 

Of course, he takes one look at the trash reconstructions of her friends she’d smuggled back, and announces, with no grace whatsoever: “What the fuck.”

 

Flushing red, Pidge promptly drops trash Shiro, whom she’d been carefully trying to lean up against one of the piles of her collected tech repair parts, and snaps, “Get out.”

 

“Oh my god,” Lance says, completely ignoring her and utterly delighted. “Are these supposed to be  _ us? _ ”

 

Dropping her face into her hands, Pidge sighs. “Lance. Please.”

 

“These are  _ adorable _ ,” he coos, poking at trash Hunk speculatively, before casting an unsure look at his own replica. “…Does my hair actually look like that?” Pidge just glares at him, and he holds his hands up defensively. “I’m just saying, I’ve looked better.”

 

“Your bangs look like you hacked them with a chainsaw,” she grumbles, and Lance shrugs.

 

“I cut them myself, I’ll admit. There’re no good salons in space.”

 

She wants to ask him what his excuse was at the Garrison, feeling acerbic and slightly mean in her embarrassment, but he’s already moved on. “That one’s Shiro, right? The broad, manly shoulders give him away.” He rests his elbow on her head, which she shoves off with distaste. “Aww…Pidge! You made these while we were gone? You missed us?” Lance flutters his eyelashes. “Were you lonely?”

 

Pidge growls, and Lance blinks, seeming to rewind his words in his head. “Oh shi—you were lonely?”

 

“Okay!” she announces loudly, trying to shove him towards the door. “ _ Thank you _ , Lance, I think it’s time for you to go—“

 

He plants his feet into the ground, the picture of stubbornness.

 

“…You were, weren’t you?”

 

Ceding defeat, Pidge drops her arms, crossing them defensively. Lance fidgets awkwardly in front of her, before he says, “I don’t uh—I’ll be real I have no idea what to do here.”

 

“You could leave.”

 

“No, no, hold on. I’m going to come up with something really sensitive and tactful to say, just give me a minute.” He trails off, eyebrows furrowed and a hand pressed to his chin in what is obviously meant to be a thinking gesture. “…You knew we were coming back to get you, right? No matter how long it took, we were gonna find you?”

 

Pidge huffs. “I know.”

 

Lance frowns, casting a critical eye at his trash double. “…Do you?”

 

“I—“ She hesitates, and then scowls. “Oh, fuck you Lance! No, I _didn’t_ know. Nobody came for me; _I_ had to get myself out of there. I had to build my own satellite to contact Allura and Coran, and _I_ had to get Shiro and Keith while you were off playing Atlantis with Hunk.” Lance winces, and Pidge cuts herself off, instantly feeling regret. She knows that’s not how it went for Lance and Hunk at all. “…Sorry. I didn’t—sorry.”

 

“It’s okay,” Lance says. After a moment, he takes a deep breath, crouching down in a move that would normally get him kicked at, and knocks his forehead against hers gently. “Look, I’m not as smart as you, okay? I can’t build crazy stuff to fix everyone’s problems, but if there’s one thing I am, it’s stubborn, so believe me when I say that so long as I get any vote in the matter, we’re  _ always _ going to come find you, alright? Always. We’re a team, we stick together.”

 

When she says nothing, Lance straightens awkwardly. “Right. Well I’m just gonna…go.”

 

He makes it to the door before she manages to force herself to speak.

 

“Wait.” Lance freezes, and she scratches unsurely at her arm. “Do you…want to see trash Keith? You could take apart his mullet to fix your hair.”

 

Lance turns around, eyes wide and smile somehow wider again. “I’d like that.”

 

 

3.

The first time they play video games is only a few days after the Beta Traz breakout. Group exhaustion at Slav’s…Slav-ness, and Shiro’s perpetual frustration with him, gives them plenty of motivation to spend their limited free time out of the way and focused on puzzling out a power source for the game system they’d bought. Eventually, with Hunk’s help, the three of them cobble the necessary parts together.

 

Lance, in a show of surprising charity, offers to let her be player one, though he all but begs for first selection from the character menu.

 

“You should choose the archer,” Pidge tells him, scooching up from behind on her knees and putting aside her bowl of food-goo flavored chips to rest her chin on his shoulder. “Ranged support. You’re good at it in real life, figures you’d have it down in video games too.”

 

Lance frowns. “I don’t know.”

 

“What?” Pidge snorts. “You’re telling me you’ve never played a sniper in a game before?  _ You? _ ”

 

“Of course I have,” Lance grumbles. “I just meant—I thought I’d play one of the fighters.” He shifts his fingers on the controller, and hovers over one of the swordsmen.

 

Pidge wrinkles her nose. “Why?”

 

“…Aren’t they the ones everyone wants to play? They’re the  _ heroes _ .”

 

“And that guy—“ Pidge points at the archer’s icon, “isn’t? Please. I always had to play support for Matt. Without me his ass wouldn’t have made it past level two.”

 

“Oh. I guess I just—never mind.”

 

Lance looks away, and Pidge thinks, not for the first time, of Beta Traz, of things spoken into the comms she was never supposed to hear. The things Lance thinks of all of them, and the things he thinks about himself.  _ Really _ thinks about himself.

 

“Hey—“ She hesitates, tongue darting out to touch her bottom lip in a quick, nervous gesture she got from her Dad’s side of the family, and never could quite seem to lose. “Support characters—support  _ fighters _ are important, okay? They protect their teammates, clear the way ahead when everyone’s too focused on what’s right in front of them. They’re not—“ Lance’s words echo in her head. “They’re not some…seventh wheel.”

 

Pidge feels Lance freeze, eyes trained ahead on the screen as his body tenses, and she continues.“…I’m pretty sure they’re one of the most necessary cogs in the machine, if anything.”

 

Lance says nothing, but after a long moment, fingers twitching over the controller in aborted movements, he selects the archer from the character menu, and Pidge breathes a sigh of relief.

 

He leans in closer to her weight, the side of his head bumping up against hers, and Pidge chooses to take that as unspoken forgiveness for her accidental listening in. She selects her character in turn, and the silence, for once, doesn’t stifle her.

 

 

4.

After their first battle with Lotor, Lance doesn’t talk.

 

Well, no, he talks—and talks, and talks _.  _ About how out-of-control fast Red is, about how great Allura was, about how much of a  _ jerk _ Lotor must be—but he doesn’t… _ talk _ . Not about Blue, not about the anxious twitch in his hand every time someone mentions him and Red in the same sentence, not about the flicker of despair that flits over his face when Coran pats Allura on the back and says something about  _ blue paladins _ .

 

He’s not jealous of Keith, or resentful of Allura, even. No, this is something else Pidge can’t quite puzzle out. An unspoken hurt.

 

She considers talking to him about it for all of several minutes, but by the time she’s made up her mind to even try, she turns around and he’s gone. When he’s not in his room, Pidge selects the next most obvious option, and hacks the security cameras to the lion hangars.

 

Allura was there, so it technically wasn’t a private moment, she tries to tell herself. She definitely feels guilty, but her—she can’t even call it curiosity, this is just plain old  _ worry— _ overwhelms it.

 

Both feelings vanish the minute she sees the footage, replaced with cold, steel  _ fury _ . Pidge isn’t someone to let her emotions get the better of her if she can help it, but this time rage unsettles even her usually rational affect.

 

Without thinking, she storms down to Blue’s hangar, near kicks open the door, and announces to the lion, without preamble. “You’re an  _ asshole _ .”

 

Avenging wrath beats in her chest, and Pidge trembles, trying to imagine what it would feel like if Green ever did that to her. Ever shut her out and wouldn’t even tell her  _ why _ .

 

Inconceivable. Her brain refuses to even compute the option, coming up all in error codes and pangs of foreboding and  _ pain _ .

 

“Why the fuck’d you have to do that to him?” she shouts, and she understands objectively she’s yelling at a giant metal lion, that this is possibly one of the most ridiculous things she’s ever done, but she finds it hard to care. “I get he needed to pilot Red, I  _ get _ that was necessary, but you could have just told him. Shutting him out like that—you know what he’s like, you know what that’d do to him!”

 

Blue doesn’t stir, not that Pidge expects her— _ it _ to, and she hisses. “That was cruel, and you know it.  _ You’re _ cruel. A cruel, heartless—“ her first instinct is to say bitch, but she’s not sure Blue deserves even that acknowledgement of her sentience right now. God knows she hasn’t put it to good use. “… _ thing _ .”

 

With one last spiteful glare at the lion, she turns to leave, and startles to a stop when she sees Lance behind her, wide-eyed and awkward. “Lance—“ she says, and she’s not sure if it’s to defend herself or apologize, but he suddenly surges forward, hugging her tightly even as his shoulders shake.

 

“…Thank you,” he murmurs, and Pidge closes her eyes. She can feel Blue stir just slightly, through the bond between all of them, but Pidge ignores it. The lion has not earned her forgiveness, and it won’t for a long time.

 

5.

Pidge understands, objectively, even before Allura puts out the call to the coalition, that Matt is going to have to leave the ship eventually. He’s a rebel officer. He has duties and obligations in this…war, just like her. He can’t spend forever joking around, playing video games, and working on mindless projects with her. It’s just not a part of their reality.

 

Still, that doesn’t make it any easier when she has to watch him go. To know that if something,  _ anything, _ goes wrong, she may never see him again. May lose him to a battle they were never supposed to belong to, when she only just got him back to begin with.

 

She doesn’t hear Lance come up behind her, stuck in her own head amidst the noises of the departing ships, until he’s already there, tucked up by her side and peering up at Matt’s ship inscrutably. He looks to it, and back to her, and back to the ship again, before he speaks, with the kind of blunt, relentless optimism she’s slowly come to appreciate. “He’ll be alright.”

 

“You don’t know that,” Pidge says with a sigh, and Lance shrugs.

 

“Course I do.”

 

“You  _ can’t _ ,” she mumbles tiredly. “You said it yourself. War has casualties. Us or them, and it can’t always be us.”

 

“Yeah, but—“ Lance makes a face, nose scrunched in thought. “I just know, okay?”

 

“… _ How? _ ” Pidge says hoarsely, and for once, in the face of what she cannot understand about Lance, she is not frustrated so much as just…defeated. “How can you possibly know?”

 

“Well,” Lance looks down at her, and his awkward, lopsided smile is like the sun. “He’s related to you, isn’t he? And you’re the toughest person I know.”

 

Pidge blinks, surprise stealing her words, and Lance nods decisively, eyes on Matt’s ship. “…He’ll come back. And hey,” he looks back down to her, “if he doesn’t, we’ll just go get him, right? He’s part of the team now. I promised, didn’t I? No one gets left behind.” Lance points an awkward finger at himself. “Not even seventh wheels, apparently. Which means you’ve got to trust me on this one. If I can somehow keep my ass alive, anyone can.”

 

“You’re not a seventh wheel,” Pidge says automatically, determined to repeat it until he gets it into his thick head, no matter how long it takes. Lance brightens visibly at her words, and Pidge swallows, a lump in her throat as she turns back to Matt’s departing ship. Wind blows fiercely as it takes off, throwing her hair in front of her eyes, and she is reminded almost inevitably of another landing platform a lifetime ago, promising her brother if he didn’t come back from Kerberos she’d _damn well_ _come and get him._ She’d already done it once, and she wasn’t afraid to do it again, if it came down to it.

 

“Let’s give him something to come back to, then,” she says, and Lance whoops, throwing an arm over her shoulders as the rebellion takes off.

 

“Hell yeah.”

 

 

+1

After Naxzela—after the panic of entrapment and waiting for the end and somehow,  _ somehow _ still escaping to live another day—she finds him in the Balmera crystal’s glow.

 

Lance looks to her as she enters the flight deck, his dark skin awash in the pale blue light, and she feels truly at ease for the first time since the fight.

 

There is still so much to do, so much to say. Discussions of where to go next, how to compensate for and honor their casualties, their dead, the question of just what to do with Lotor—God,  _ Lotor _ , Zarkon’s heir and their questionably former enemy, asleep in the prison hold of their castle.

 

But Pidge looks at Lance, and suddenly all that feels like it can wait, for now. The castle can guard its slumbering load without her, this more important.

 

“Should I go?” she asks, already knowing what he’ll say in response, and Lance shakes his head.

 

“Stay?”

 

She does.

 

**Author's Note:**

> As always, you can find me on Tumblr at [pastel-clark.tumblr.com](http://www.pastel-clark.tumblr.com) and Twitter at [twitter.com/Pastel_Clark](https://twitter.com/Pastel_Clark)
> 
>  


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